Entries for July 2007

As official Washington heads into its summer vacation season, President Bush is portrayed by White House insiders as eager for a brief break at his Texas ranch in mid-August but ready for the looming political battles of the fall.

"He's as fully engaged as I've seen him," a senior administration official told U.S. News. "He's the one with all the energy that keeps us jacked up."

The youngest member of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts, suffered an unexplained seizure yesterday. The 52-year-old was getting out of a boat when the seizure occurred and was mildly scraped up when he fell onto the dock. Roberts suffered a similar unexplained attack in 1993. After yesterday’s seizure, he was kept in the hospital overnight and passed a thorough neurological exam.  Roberts was nominated for the Supreme Court in 2005 by President Bush to take the seat of retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor but was promoted to chief justice upon the death of William Rehnquist.

The man who tried to blow up a passenger plane by igniting a shoe bomb is expressing no regrets as he prepares to spend the rest of his life in a Colorado prison. In 2001, Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” attempted to set off an explosion aboard a flight from Paris to Miami, but was thwarted as other passengers and crew members tackled him. A British newspaper got its hands on letters from Reid in which he was optimistic that his situation would change for the better.  The Daily Mirror did not say how it obtained Reid’s writings.

In 2000, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska renovated his home, roughly doubling it in size. Yesterday, federal agents searched the house as part of an ongoing investigation of the 83-year-old senator and his ties to an oil company executive convicted of bribing elected officials. The executive, Bill Allen, is founder of VECO Corp., an Alaskan oil company that has received federal contracts worth millions of dollars. Federal authorities suspect that Allen may have helped with the financing of Stevens’s home renovations.  In 2004, U.S. News also reported on Stevens’s close ties to other Alaskan corporations, which often do not have to bid competitively for federal contracts. Stevens is known for bringing home a lot of federal dollars to his Alaskan constituents. For example, U.S. News reported in 2000 that, thanks to him, $176,000 in federal funds helped the Reindeer Herders Association.

However their talks went in private, President Bush and new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown were clearly on the same page Monday when it comes to dressing. Tieless informality, typically the practice for the president and his VIP visitors at Camp David, was out. Both leaders wore suits and ties, oddly businesslike for the woodsy atmosphere at the presidential retreat--and perhaps a signal that the new British leader isn’t seeking the same buddy-buddy relationship enjoyed by his predecessor Tony Blair.

With his pal Tony Blair out of office, President Bush has to start from scratch with new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown is visiting Bush at Camp David this morning, where the two will chat about Iraq, Darfur, and global trade. While the duo will surely be chummy in public, U.S. News reported that in private, Brown “might step on some toes and wouldn't hesitate to disagree with Bush on some issues, including Iraq, Iran, and global warming.” 

The controversial diabetes drug Avandia should be pulled off the market, a federal scientist said today.  The drug, which is supposed to control blood sugar by making the body more responsive to insulin, has been shown to increase the risk of heart attacks in patients. The drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline PLC disputes this claim. U.S. News reported in June that the Food and Drug Administration took heat from Congress for not more closely monitoring Avandia and other medications.

On your mark, get set . . . text! Text messaging on your cellphone hasn’t been around for too long, but it has already become a competitive sport. Participants at the North Dakota State Fair, armed with their phones, entered a competition sponsored by a cellphone company and were given phrases to tap out. Whoever texted the fastest and most accurately won. Thirty-year-old Kevin Taylor finished second after forgetting an exclamation point at the end of the phrase “I hope I win the grand prize of $1,000 so I can buy a new phone. Whoo!" The grand prize of $1,000 went to Beth Brevik, 32, of Minot. Thirty-eight competitors tested their text-tapping skills; the two 30-somethings beat out a handful of cellphone-savvy teenagers.

House and Senate Republican leaders are renewing their call for extending the Bush 2001 tax cuts and are warning that Democrats will hike taxes in an omnibus spending bill if they opt out of voting on individual appropriations bills.

The House of Representatives looks poised to pass a bill today that would implement the remaining security recommendations from the 9/11 commission report. The Senate passed the legislation last night by a vote of 85 to 8. The White House has expressed disapproval of several of the bill’s provisions but has not issued a veto threat. U.S. News reported on this legislation earlier this week.

The economy woke up and grew at a 3.4 percent pace in the second quarter, which is the strongest it has been in more than a year, according to the Commerce Department.  This news is better than expected but doesn’t seem to be motivating investors today to boost the stock market, which suffered from its second-largest drop all year yesterday because of concerns over the U.S. mortgage and corporate lending markets.

Canned food that could give people the muscle-paralyzing disease botulism is still turning up in grocery and convenience stores across the country. Food and Drug Administration and state officials are spot-checking stores for recalled cans of chili, stew, hash, and other products from Castleberry’s Food Co. The food has already sickened and hospitalized four people, and officials worry it could harm dozens more.  Those concerned about unsafe food can check out U.S. News’s guide on how to eat safely.

Trouble appears to be growing for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Now, two high-level officials (one current, one former) appear to have contradicted Gonzales’s account of the 2004 hospital visit Gonzales made to then Attorney General John Ashcroft.